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21/9/2011

Two exhibitions

Spruth Magers, Berlin

John Baldessari
Double Feature

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are delighted to present in Berlin, with the solo exhibition Double Feature, a new work series by John Baldessari.

Ever since the middle of the 1960s, the works of American artist John Baldessari have developed into one of the most pioneering oeuvres of contemporary art. They serve as an important model for a young generation of artists and curators. His photo-collages, billboards, artist's books, performances, and films are to be assigned exclusively neither to Concept Art nor to Pop Art, but instead have always remained independent through their autonomy and unpredictability.

Baldessari's medium is above all the collage, and accordingly the combination of images and contents which traditionally do not belong together. Using as a basis his own archive of film stills, texts, photographs, and newspaper clippings all of which relate to motifs from everyday reality, the mass media, advertisement, and film Baldessari arranges montages of images and of image-texts which create new interconnections of meaning through the procedures of fading out and cross-fading or cutting out. By means of productive gaps between image and word, he focuses on the relationship between language and power, just as has been examined since the 1960s by the post-structuralists Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze. Thereby of major importance for Baldessari is the issue of emotionality: Visual jokes and plays on words are the means by which he disrupts the strict classification of sense and nonsense and sets in motion processes of critical thought with regard to society.

The focus on allegorical and iconographical traditions, characteristic as it is for Baldessari's artistic practice, is also recognizable in his new work-group Double Feature: What is significant of these image-text montages is the utilization of concrete pictorial motifs from the history of modern art from Henri Matisse, Kurt Schwitters, and Max Ernst, all the way to Francis Picabia. From these models, Baldessari extracts in his customary manner selected elements which are printed onto canvas and are individually overpainted by himself. This gives rise to hybrid works in which the sources of the motifs and the handwriting of the artist coexist in the painted flow of the surfaces. Oscillating between collage and painting, Baldessari's versions do not consist of decontextualized copies but instead present autonomous originals which repeat painting and its forms of appearance from a different perspective.

Baldessari combines these motifs with printed captions upon the canvas. There are quotes of gloomy titles of American film noir from the 1940s and 1950s such as Blast of Silence, Dead Reckoning, Sudden Fear, or Deadline at Dawn. During this era, the thrillers filmed in black-and-white were often low-budget productions. Characteristic for this genre are nightmarish stories which mirror the abysses of existential and social crises.

The fascination with B-movies and nouvelle vague films is one of the constants running through Baldessari's oeuvre; he has taken their gestures, drama, and glamorous passion into a large number of compositions utilizing stills from unknown Hollywood motion pictures. Serving as an important source of inspiration in this context is Jean-Luc Godard's experimental handling of cinematic montage, which makes use of such techniques as leaps in time or space between individual film segments (jump cuts) and, by means of these distancing and distorting effects, destroy the film's power of illusion.

In Baldessari's new collages, the verbal combinations contrast with the motifs and summon up complex series of associations, inasmuch as two different areas are brought together: the works of avant-garde artists which today are considered to be high culture, and the American crime thrillers of the postwar era which are relegated to the status of B-movies. He thereby establishes subtle formal and contentual relationships between titles and pictures. The series gives rise to pictorial puzzles in which the extracted individual segments become something entirely different when inserted into a new picture. In this way the artist aims at cultural memory and engages in a play involving recognition of the contexts from which the elements derive. For Baldessari, images and words are of equal value, and with them he creates his own poetry whose language asserts itself over and beyond social value-systems and linguistic limitations.

John Baldessari (born 1931 in National City, California) lives and works in Santa Monica, California. His works were part of the 47th (1997) and 53rd (2009) Venice Biennials, the Carnegie International (1985-86), the Whitney Biennial (1983), as well as the Documenta V (1972) and VII (1982). In 2005, an extensive, two-part retrospective was dedicated to the artist at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien and at the Kunsthaus Graz. In June 2009, John Baldessari was awarded the Golden Lion at the 53rd Venice Biennial for his life work. During the same year, there opened at the Tate Modern in London (2009) his large retrospective Pure Beauty, which subsequently could be seen at the MACBA, Barcelona (2010), the LACMA, Los Angeles (2010), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2010/2011). Recently the artist has presented his works in solo exhibitions at the Fondazione Prada (2010) and at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2011).

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Thomas Scheibitz
mk/ULTRA

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are delighted to present mk/ULTRA, the second solo exhibition of new work by Thomas Scheibitz at the gallery in Berlin.

In his paintings and sculptures, Thomas Scheibitz explores the possibilities of abstraction and figuration, transcending the categorical assignment of these concepts by evolving his own pictorial language. His work examines the interrelationship between visual and linguistic information, incorporating architectural and landscape elements alongside value-laden symbols or heraldic motifs. Although Scheibitz’s multipart compositions bear legible traces of reality, attempting to determine their meaning with the aid of conventional principles of classification and systems of order does not take us very far. The process of determining the appropriate degree of encoding when combining existing elements and things that have never been seen before is repeated in the work titles, which are derived from an individual collection of names, slogans, literary references and invented terms accrued from art history, the media or popular culture. The titles provide no explicit indication of the works’ content; indeed they themselves emphasise the variable meaning of linguistic signs, their capacity to migrate into other contexts and their expressive potential as text-based images.

With the title of the current exhibition mk/ULTRA Scheibitz enters a field of historico-cultural study into the relationship between the human subject and reality, and how this relationship can be influenced or controlled with the aid of targeted information. In its alternative spelling, ‘MKULTRA’ is the code name of an American secret service programme that was in operation from the 1950s until the end of the Cold War. This experimental research project involved attempts to develop a ‘truth drug’ and other forms of mind control that were intended to make people divulge important information without any direct physical coercion. While mk was simply an abbreviated reference to a particular governmental institution, the Latin word ultra means ‘beyond, in excess of’. The term became popular during the 20th century, both in the realm of art and in everyday speech:
it was a favoured expression among the Surrealists and the Ultra-Lettrists, ‘ultras’ is used to describe a subculture of football supporters, and a hardcore band from Chicago also called themselves MK-Ultra.

For his new exhibition at Sprüth Magers Berlin, Thomas Scheibitz has devised a specific configuration of works for the gallery space, which he has further transformed by incorporating a column into the existing architecture. This sculptural intervention with the coated pillar alters the perception of the space and historicises its basic structure. A similar interaction between painterly surfaces and three-dimensional volumes is set in motion in object-based works such as the sculpture Terrasse (2011) or the relief If Seven was Nine (2011): by deploying the materiality of rust a product of corrosion or the haptic qualities and structure of coloured fabric, Scheibitz uses untypical materials to imitate monochrome painting and its distinctive surface properties.

The versatility of numbers and letters, which are key components of Scheibitz’s formal vocabulary, is apparent in his painting Nachricht (2011) a conglomeration of geometric forms, shapes, abstracted ground plans, architectural fragments and the numeral 1. His interest in logos and pictographs stems, among other things, from a preoccupation with the etchings of the Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720 1778), who constructed initial letters using elements drawn from the visual language of architecture. In Scheibitz’s paintings, linguistic signs and numbers are likewise integrated into a tectonic space, where tiered planes and overlapping fore- and backgrounds serve to generate a sense of depth. In the artificial parallel worlds of his works, the visual signs express their own, open-ended semantics as carriers of cultural meaning. In Kino (2011), the impression of a place where new images are generated is reinforced by the centralised perspective: alluding to the projection space of cinema, the painting focuses our attention on this medium which has fundamentally affected our visual memory since the turn of the 20th century, using moving images to create multiple meta-levels of reality. Scheibitz’s works consistently convey the impression of a hidden, indecipherable message. His mode of influencing human consciousness is to create a visual overload of pictorial and graphic codes. With regards to mk/ULTRA, the emphasis is not on suspicious circumstances or conspiracy theories, but rather on the immediate viewing experience in front of the work that throws the viewer back upon his or her own experience of the world.

Thomas Scheibitz (born 1968 in Radeberg, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. His recent solo shows includeIl fiume e le sue fonti, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, (2011), III Things for a second ONE, Parra & Romero, Madrid (2011) and Der ungefegte Raum, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck (2010). Scheibitz’s work has also been presented in many international group shows, most recently at the Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2011), Kunsthal Rotterdam (2011), Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2010/2011) and at Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (2010). In 2010 Thomas Scheibitz curated the group show A moving plan B chapter ONE at the Drawing Room in London, while his own solo exhibition A moving plan B chapter TWO was shown simultaneously at Sprüth Magers London.

Image: John Baldessari

For further information and press enquiries please contact Silvia Baltschun (sb@spruethmagers.com).

Opening reception: 22.09.2011, 6 9 pm

Monika Spruth Philomene Magers
Oranienburger Str. 18 - Berlin
Viewing Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm
and by appointment

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